Originally, Raymond Hill developed uBlock, but he gave it away because it was too much work. However, the new owner of uBlock turned it into a spamware, so Hill forked uBlock and created uBlock Origin, which is still under development today.

It’s the original project that the original developer gave to somebody else, but then decided to continue working on the project anyway under the „Origin“ moniker.

At some point ublock was sold and to quote Wikipedia: „since February 2019, uBlock began allowing users to participate in "Acceptable Ads",[21][22] a program run by Adblock Plus that allows some ads which are deemed "acceptable", and for which the larger publishers pay a fee.“